Anti-Armored Age

We live in an armored age. There has come to be astonishing sophistication in producing an armored self on paper [...] And I think it's a trap, I think it's a terrible trap. Frost says, quoting Horace, "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."

[...] Maybe I should put it this way: If you can't tell when something goes wrong in a work, that this line is bad or this move wrong, you also can't tell when there's something right. There's a kind of power in writing that has a building sense of a center, that then opens the writer to the objection that something has gone wrong, something has not fulfilled itself, something has not developed from the poem's spine. Without risking that, you can't have the kind of decisive and powerful rightness that I crave as a reader.

- Frank Bidart from an interview in On Frank Bidart: Fastening the Voice to the Page

(fitting so well into this narrow pink box, the body)

Likewise, I suggest that if you can't allow things to go wrong in your life, 

you have little chance of recognizing what's going right.